Re: Can XForms handle rich text?

Ahh, the old customer dance. It sounds to me like your customer is trying to
implement a rich feature GUI as a web application. Completely rediculous.
However, I have been down the road of these customers before and I simply dump
them. Why? Because I am wastign my time. By the time I hack together some bloody
solution that is the result of their CEOs making programmign technology
solution, I could have done four other projects. Further, I will spend hours
supporting the POS that comes out of the effort and most likely not get paid for
these hours since the customer will assert that "it should have worked in the
fist place so it isnt our fault." In addition, I will be fanning the fire and
will get another lame contract with poor technology choices.

Generally, I will only take contracts from people that leave the technology
decisions to the resident experts in the appropriate fields. Even if those
decisions arent mine, Im liable to get a much more feasible product out of a
lame decision made by a corporate developer than a lame decision made by an
executive.

On a purlely philosophical note, I find it a travesty when we as a community are
willing to build bad things that we KNOW are bad just because someone pays for
it. I find it bad science and ethically questionable.

-- Robert

"Roman Huditsch" <roman.huditsch@hico.com> wrote in message
news:0C79A363CB0321418927D0CB1AD0403C29AAEB@hicoetsrv000006.hico.local...

Hi all,

Well, actually many of our customers do also want to have the possibility to
enter formatted text into form fields.
Unfortunately there is no sense in trying to discuss the real purpose of
XForms - as Robert stated it - with them, because either they get
the functionality they want or there will be no project and of course no money,
too...

I hope that there will be some way to make them think in the same way we do
about XForms.....


wbr,
Roman


Mag.(FH) Roman Huditsch (hRHU )
Developer .:. Information & Application Engineering
_____________________________________________________________________
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TechLab, Thomas A. Edison Straße 2.
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-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Robert Simmons [mailto:derisor@arcor.de]
Gesendet: Freitag, 29. August 2003 17:30
An: www-forms@w3.org
Betreff: Re: Can XForms handle rich text?



Why would you want to? XForms is a model for data entry and is not related to
presentation logic or data processing at all. Mixing them would be ... bad. In
fact the separation of presentation and data entry model is at the core of the
driving force for XForms.

It seems to me that what you are looking for is XSLT and not XForms. XSLT is a
technology for converting componetized XML technologies into various
presentation schemes. Check out XSLT and apache cocoon.

-- Robert

<Robert_Barker@vanguard.com> wrote in message
news:OF8F9E74A0.81CEBFF3-ON85256D91.0045986E-85256D91.00462751@vanguard.com...
>
> We are working on a web based solution to capture documents in XML in order
> to display later in different formats.
>
> The issues we are facing are:
>
> 1.  How to capture Rich Text like italics, bold, underline, bulleted items.
> We are trying to use something other than Microsoft Client Software
> Products (Word, Infopath).
>
> 2.  How to display the xml in a PDF or html format retaining the nice
> format?  Here are thoughts are to use XSL-FO, but we are looking for a tool
> to help us create the formatted output.
>
> Can XFORMS capture the rich text (bullets, italics, etc.)?
>
> Any other thoughts?  Thanks.
>
>
>
> Bob Barker
> The Vanguard Group.
>
>

Received on Friday, 29 August 2003 12:35:50 UTC